Atheneum was founded by Alfred Knopf Jr. (who had recently left his parents' publishing house), along with Simon Michael Bessie and Hiram Haydn. Notable on the company's first list was the English translation of Andre Schwartz-Bart's The Last of the Just (1960), a narrative of European Jewry culminating in the Holocaust that became an American bestseller. The company merged with Scribner in 1978, and was later acquired by Macmillan.